12/17/25: Wiles Caught On Tape Lying, Bari Weiss Erika Interview Flop, NYT Mocks Eptsein 'Conspiracies', MIT Scientist Murdered, Gaza Travel Ban

Summary

Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar – December 17, 2025

Episode Theme:
A deep dive into major political and media developments, including the Susie Wiles Vanity Fair controversy, Bari Weiss’s media ascent and interview flop, the New York Times’ attempt to "debunk" Epstein conspiracies, the murder of an MIT nuclear scientist, and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza amid political maneuvering.

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1. The Susie Wiles Vanity Fair Controversy

Main Story:
Trump aide Susie Wiles was the subject of a bombshell Vanity Fair exposé, featuring extensive quotes attributed to her about Trump and his inner circle—some unflattering, some surprisingly candid. The Trump camp's reaction, media strategies, and implications for the 2024 campaign are analyzed.

Key Points & Insights

• Trump’s Reaction:
  • Trump’s reply to Wiles calling him an “alcoholic personality” was nonchalant and self-deprecating.
  • “Yep, spot the lie. Sounds about right.” – Commenting on the quote (Krystal Ball, 02:12)
• Administration's Damage Control:
  • Rapid and united defense from Trump world, including public statements from Caroline Levitt and others.
  • Question raised: Why would the White House, infamously hostile to media, grant 11 interviews to a liberal outlet?
• Wiles Caught on Tape:
  • Wiles tried to deny some comments, including those on Elon Musk’s ketamine use, but Vanity Fair's author produced audio recordings as proof.
  • “Shockingly, the thing she was quoted saying, she actually did say.” – Krystal Ball (10:01)
• Candid Internal Assessments:
  • Wiles appears to have shared (on tape) private thoughts about fellow Trumpworld figures (e.g., J.D. Vance: Always “political”; Russ Vought: “Right-wing zealot”).
  • She voiced opposition to some Trump policies, such as mass January 6th pardons and certain tariffs.
• Why Was She So Honest?
  • Possible misunderstanding: Wiles thought it was for a Chris Whipple book, not for political reporting.
  • “If I had to guess, she maybe thought that this was coming out after her tenure was over…” – Krystal Ball (18:22)

Notable Quotes

• “Nobody reads the articles anyway…people would just pull out the quotes and circulate them on TikTok and Twitter…” – Krystal Ball (06:08)
• “If you think Trump is pissed at her, you don't praise her.” – Sophie Cunningham on internal signaling (14:06)
• “She has the same thoughts as most Americans on most of these people.” – Krystal Ball (11:40)

Memorable Moments

• Joking about “normal duck” T-shirts after the Elon Musk “odd, odd duck” quote.
• Comparing power-posing team photos from the Trump and Bush eras, and Krystal's own Politico photoshoot.
• “You look intimidating, right?” (16:32, Sophie recounting Krystal’s photoshoot)

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2. Bari Weiss: Media Darling & Ratings Flop

Segment Overview:
A critical review of a New York Magazine profile on Bari Weiss and her high-profile (but low-rated) CBS town hall interview with Erika Kirk. The discussion explores Weiss’s path from New York Times exile to free speech icon beloved by powerful elites—and how her moment in the network spotlight fizzled.

Key Discussion Points

• Weiss’s Rise:
  • Ousted from NYT after controversial MeToo and culture war stances.
  • Became a high-demand persona at Los Angeles salons with rich Hollywood and tech elites, positioned as a centrist icon.
  • Her early college activism: Pro-Israel, worked to remove pro-Palestinian professors—sparking later accusations of hypocrisy as a cancel culture critic (26:09).
• Media Dealings:
  • Massive funding for her Free Press outlet—seen as a legitimizing face for anti-cancel-culture centrism:
    “She became the go-to…” – Krystal Ball (26:09)
  • Barry’s profile was embraced because she “looks young and liberal but says things I agree with” – Krystal Ball (27:15)
• The Big Experiment — CBS Interview Flop:
  • Saturday primetime town hall with Erika Kirk, intended as a ratings and influence win, underperformed grievously:
    “Beyond the anemic ratings, they also put Barry's primetime special on their YouTube channel and it has a grand total of 72,000 views after two days…” – Krystal Ball (29:29)
  • Social media “views” were inflated; most discussion was negative or mocking.
  • Glenn Greenwald: “I actually didn't think it was possible to take one of the three major TV networks…and in primetime drag it down to the lowly ratings level of Substack.” (Quoted by Krystal, 29:29)
• Underlying Dynamics:
  • Her appeal is largely to elites who want validation against cultural trends they find threatening.
  • Her on-camera pivot may have overestimated mass audience hunger for her brand.

Notable Quotes

• “Social views are bullshit.” – Sophie Cunningham (31:11), on inflated ‘engagement’ numbers.
• “People were really talking about it. I mean, it definitely had people engaging in discourse about Erica Kirk…” – Sophie Cunningham (31:35)

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3. The New York Times’ Epstein Report – More Questions than Answers

Main Story:
NYT’s thousands-of-words reporting attempts to “explain” how Jeffrey Epstein got rich, but Krystal and Sophie find it leaves key questions troublingly unresolved and actively misleads on the nature of “conspiracies.”

Key Points & Insights

• NYT’s Framing:
  • Article claims to debunk espionage and blackmail theories, offering “prosaic” fraud and manipulation instead.
  • Krystal: “Classic New York Times formulation. Abundant conspiracy theorists say X. But we found a thing that is completely non-responsive to that thing.” (35:10)
• Actual Findings:
  • NYT seems to misunderstand or misrepresent that the “blackmail” conspiracy is more about protection/operation for intelligence agencies than direct profit.
  • Connections identified (British arms dealer Douglas Leese, Iran-Contra-linked John Stanley Pottinger) only deepen the intrigue, not resolve it.
    “Go ahead and look up Douglas Leese…” (39:40)
• Takeaway:
  • “Lots of questions raised,” not answered. Even after reading, Epstein’s unlikely rise and strange impunity remain a mystery.

Memorable Quotes

• “If anything, it's more of a mystery after you see how many people were screwed over by him.” – Sophie Cunningham (37:43)
• “You're not a moron, you're creating questions.” – Sophie Cunningham (41:06)

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4. MIT Scientist Murdered & Ivy League Campus Shootings

Segment Overview:
Updates on two major, disturbing crime stories:

• Brown University shooting (two students dead; person of interest on video)
• MIT nuclear scientist Nuno Loreiro killed at home in Brookline

Key Insights

• Brown Shooting:
  • FBI is searching, offering $50,000 reward; unclear if connected to MIT murder.
  • Local authorities’ performance under scrutiny, especially amid uncertainty over suspect status.
  • “If it turns out that the same person shot, then murdered another professor, this time at MIT…they're going to look even dumber for trying to assuage the fears…” – Sophie Cunningham (44:24)
• MIT Murder:
  • Loreiro was a gifted nuclear scientist; speculation abounds over potential links to foreign policy or Israel, as nuclear scientists are sometimes targeted.
  • “Israel…considers all nuclear scientists legitimate targets…barbaric…bombing nuclear scientists and their families at will.” – Krystal Ball (46:15)

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5. Gaza: Humanitarian Crisis Grows under Travel Ban and Siege

Segment Overview:
A new focus on the lived, daily horrors of the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, including the impact of Trump’s new travel ban affecting Palestinians and the devastation wrought by garbage and flooding on displaced Gazans.

Key Points & Insights

• Travel Ban:
  • Trump expands list to include the Palestinian Authority, worsening the plight of stateless and besieged people.
  • “Putting people from the Palestinian Authority on the travel ban has an added layer of cruelty because they don't have their own country.” – Krystal Ball (48:50)
• Waste Crisis:
  • Report from inside Gaza highlighting collapse of waste management; families living among literal mounds of garbage, children playing on trash heaps.
  • “We were forced to stay at this dump. I'm suffering…20 or 30 rats inside my tent, right inside of it.” – (From Drop site reporting, quoted by Krystal 52:11)
• U.S. and Israeli Policy:
  • U.S. military experts gave up trying to solve the aid/supplies bottleneck; “not logistics, but political problem.”
  • “Within weeks, they all left because they were like, oh, this is not a logistics problem, this is a political problem.” – Krystal Ball (55:17)
• Political Incentives:
  • With the war “over,” attention and urgency to humanitarian disaster is fading, raising fears catastrophe will persist or escalate unaddressed.

Notable Quotes

• “They've offered to open the Rafah border in one direction…destroy that hope…your life is just unlivable, so why don't you just leave?” (Krystal Ball, 54:13)
• “Everyone is happy that the war is over…But…political incentives to keep an eye on the humanitarian crisis…diminished...” – Sophie Cunningham (57:44)

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6. Closing/Future Episodes

• Upcoming: Interviews on humanitarian emergencies in Sudan (Nathaniel Raymond/Yale).
• Programming Note: Pre-recorded content for upcoming holidays; new live show on January 7th.

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Summary Table of Key Timestamps

| Time | Topic/Event | Speaker(s) | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------| | 02:12 | Trump’s reaction to Wiles Vanity Fair piece | Sophie Cunningham, Krystal | | 10:01 | Wiles caught on tape lying/recordings existed | Krystal Ball | | 16:06 | Power pose media photos, Politico shoot | Krystal Ball, Sophie Cunningham | | 26:09 | Bari Weiss’s activist origins, LA elite salons | Krystal Ball | | 29:29 | Bari/CBS Town Hall ratings flop, Glenn Greenwald quote | Krystal Ball | | 35:10 | NYT Epstein report—not debunking the real conspiracy theories | Krystal Ball, Sophie Cunningham | | 41:06 | NYT coverage raises more Qs, “Not answering questions” | Sophie Cunningham | | 46:15 | MIT scientist assassination—potential foreign policy implications | Krystal Ball, Sophie Cunningham | | 48:50 | Gaza travel ban, impact on Palestinians | Krystal Ball | | 55:17 | U.S. experts abandon logistics effort in Gaza: “It’s a political problem” | Krystal Ball |

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Overall Tone:
Frank, skeptical, often darkly humorous, and consistently critical of establishment narratives—true to Breaking Points’ mission of holding the powerful to account from both left and right perspectives.

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For Listeners Who Missed It:
This episode delivers an unvarnished, behind-the-scenes perspective on how media, power, and politics interlock—whether in the rarely-punctured Trump inner circle, the making of new media celebrities, the whitewashing of elite criminality, or the slow-burning tragedies on U.S. campuses and in Gaza. The hosts balance sharp critique with a commitment to overlooked details and authentic viewpoints rarely heard elsewhere.

Transcript

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[Sophie Cunningham]

We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you@breaking points.com Donald Trump has responded to Susie Wilde's shocking 11 interviews with Vanity Fair that were reported out in a two part series yesterday that absolutely stunned Washington. Everybody was trying to figure out exactly what happened here. Trump was asked by the New York Post if he stands by Susie Wiles after she was quoted in Vanity Fair saying he has a quote, alcoholics personality. Trump basically is like, yep, spot the lie. Sounds about right. And you know, Ryan, I actually think of all of the Wiles quotes to pull out and say this is problematic or super newsworthy, that is the least of almost all of them in this long two part series from Chris Whipple in Vanity Fair. Because again, like he's self deprecating and he understands what she means by that. I think we kind of all understand what she means by that.

[Krystal Ball]

Right.

[Sophie Cunningham]

So of course it's interesting to see her talking like that about her boss and a liberal media outlet. But also I think it just speaks to like Trump understands when you call him things like that. Yeah. What did he say to Zara? And he's like, I've been called much.

[Krystal Ball]

Worse than call much worse than despot. Yeah, yeah. Trump famously doesn't drink, but he has said and he said again if he did, he would have, he has an addictive personality. He likely would have become an alcoholic. His, his brother was, which is a formative experience in his own life. He has the big personality and the wild mood swings of some of that kind of person which Wiles talked about. Kind of like a dry drunk who was never a drunk. Caroline Levitt was asked how what went wrong? Let's get a response on Fox here.

[Caroline Levitt]

I wanted to ask you, Caroline, about the two part series of articles in Vanity Fair on Susie Wiles, the chief of staff and the President's inner circle. I mean clearly there was a lot of cooperation between the White House and Vanity Fair on this because there's numerous interviews that Susie Wiles had with the writer over the course of pretty much a year. Portraits were taken of his inner circle, including her, J.D. vance, Stephen Miller. I mean it looks like the White House was working hand in glove with Vanity Fair. And yet here's Susie Wiles reaction to the series of articles. Quote, the article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece of on me and the finest president, White House staff and cabinet in history. Significant context was disregarded and much of what I and others said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume after reading it that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team. She, she goes on after that you can read the full thing on X. But what happened? What went wrong?

[Susie Wiles]

Well, look, I would just echo my boss, Susie Wiles, who is the best chief of staff in our nation's history, working for the greatest president in our nation's history and that this was unfortunately another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take the chief's words out of context. But I think most importantly, the bias of omission was ever present throughout this story. The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House. And as Susie said today, it's deeply unfortunate that happened, but it won't distract us from making America great again. And President Trump has been such a productive president and has accomplished more in 11 months than most presidents do in eight years because of his vision and his tenacity, which is executed on and facilitated by our great White House Chief of staff, Susie Wiles, whom I'm very proud of to call a boss and a mentor and a friend.

[Krystal Ball]

The whole taken out of context and the whole you didn't include all the good things we did is so silly because nobody reads the articles anyway. So like, even if they included from the administration's perspective all the amazing things that they think that they did, people would just pull out the quotes and circulate them on TikTok and Twitter and talk about them.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Well, and it's non responsive to John Roberts question, which is basically like, why is the White House cooperating? Why would Suzy Wile is the White.

[Caroline Levitt]

House chief of staff?

[Krystal Ball]

We know that's how Vanity Fair did the story.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Like you all are more aware than any administration in history how the media works. And you are like probably the most sharp or ardent, you're probably the most ardent opponents of the media in history of presidential administrations. And that's a high bar. So why would you ever allow for 11 long interviews? Why would your chief of staff, who by the way, in a stroke of complete irony, is the one person who's seen as Trump's gatekeeper, the only person who has succeeded successfully sort of kept Trump in line. Meaning you're not letting random articles from like Gateway pundit being printed out and put it on put on his desk. You're not letting random like Laura Loomer into the Oval Office. Reportedly, Suzy Wiles is the one. Laura Loomer was at the White House last night, by the way, but is the one who sort of keeps that type of thing at arm's length.

[Krystal Ball]

Was at the White House last night.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah, I think it was for a Hanukkah celebration. But anyway, going moving on. Trump announced her engagement. You haven't seen this video. We're actually not moving on.

[Krystal Ball]

No so we got. Yeah, and so he also announced, like, banning Palestinians from the country. Is this a coincidence or.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Great question, but this is the irony of ironies, is that Susie Wiles is the person who is like, the gatekeeper of media access, and Susie Wiles is the person then who was giving 11 interviews. My best theory on this is that she, for as shrewd of an operator as she reportedly is, probably thought she was off the record or would have, quote, approval or something like that from the journalist. Whether it was a miscommunication or naivete on her part, I doubt that it was naivete. We're going to get into a second, one second about the validity of the quotes themselves. But the Caroline Levitt point here is to emphasize there was a massive circling of the wagons yesterday. Now, we could put this next element, D3, up on the screen. This is all, like, cabinet secretaries, people from every corner of Trump world going on the record in defense of Susie Wiles yesterday. And so there's this question hanging in the air when Crystal and Sager covered the story, because the revelation that Susie Wiles had said all of these things and spoken 11 times with this Vanity Fair reporter, is she out? Is she going to be out of a job? Because Trump is going to look at this as disloyal. It's going to look like a massive error in judgment from the one person who is supposed to have the best judgment in the administration. And then we pretty quickly, within a couple of hours, got an answer to that question, and it's no. And that question was important because that means the Trump White House without Susie Wiles would likely look more like the first administration. It would probably start to become even more chaotic. If you think it's chaotic now, it probably become even more chaotic. But circling the wagons happened. Suzy Wiles seems to be perfectly safe in her job for now. Let's put D4 up on the screen. This gets into the validity of what actually happened here. So Wiles said it was ridiculous in an interview with the New York Times that she would have commented on Elon.

[Krystal Ball]

Musk and ketamine, which is why is that really? Why is that ridiculous?

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah, it sounds like something someone would.

[Krystal Ball]

Have commented on it. But anyway, go ahead.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Right. Well, the author of the Vanity Fair story, according to the New York Times, played a recording for the Times where Susie Wiles is heard saying that, quote.

[Krystal Ball]

So shockingly, the thing she was said, the thing she was quoted saying, she actually did say.

[Sophie Cunningham]

So if there are any people. So Weil said he was, quote, an avowed ketamine user. A quote, odd, odd duck. She is all of these things.

[Krystal Ball]

He is an odd, odd duck.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Defensible.

[Krystal Ball]

She calls him brilliant. The full quote is odd, odd duck, like a lot of brilliant people are, or something like that. Yes, yes, he is an odd duck. Would anybody say that's a normal duck?

[Sophie Cunningham]

No, a normal duck.

[Krystal Ball]

It's not a normal duck.

[Sophie Cunningham]

You should make T shirts, dropsite T shirts. Let's just say normal duck. But anyway, so this is like, you can see how Susie Wiles is in a probably very friendly back and forth with a Vanity Fair reporter. Maybe thinks she's gonna have, quote, approval, maybe thinks she's on background or something and is saying what everybody talks about privately when it comes to Elon Musk over the course of the last year. And, and it ends up in print. Tries to say it didn't happen. So if there were any people in the administration who were saying, we think some of these quotes are fully made up, this revelation from the New York Times that the author has the recordings, that's not ideal. Susie obviously said these things. But the question of the context, I don't doubt and I don't think either of us doubts that some of these things probably are more sensational. There's context left out that might make them more sensational than they actually were in conversation. But that's what journalists do. It's. You have your principal, the White House chief of staff saying something. It's probably going to be sensationalized in print, which is why you don't talk to Vanity Fair if you're Susie Wiles.

[Krystal Ball]

And a main thing we really just learned is that she has the same thoughts as most Americans on most of these people, which, like when it came to J.D. vance, for instance, she's like, yeah, I think his conversion from like never Trumper to pro Trump was kind of political in a way.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Right.

[Krystal Ball]

It's like, okay, so you're willing to just not lie about that conversion when it comes to who's the, like, complete lunatic over at omb?

[Sophie Cunningham]

Russ.

[Krystal Ball]

Yes. Russ Vogt. She's like, yeah, that guy's a complete lunatic.

[Sophie Cunningham]

She called him a zealot.

[Krystal Ball]

She called him a hard right wing zealot.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Russ Vote. Yeah, Russ Vote is. I think anybody on the right would tell you Rust Vote is a hard right wing zealot. And MAGA people would be like, hell yeah, he is.

[Krystal Ball]

Last night he said he's shutting down the climate, the atmospheric measurement agency that's based out of Colorado, because he said they've been doing Climate alarmism for too long. So, like, yeah, this guy is like a total right wing revolutionary.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Revolutionary. There you go.

[Krystal Ball]

Counter revolutionary. But we'd have to have a revolution to have a counter revolutionary. He's out there. And she agrees with that. She said that we had a revolution after Woodrow Wilson.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Okay, we don't have to get into this.

[Krystal Ball]

She said she thought it was a little bit nuts for Trump to pardon every single January 6th, and she was overruled on that. She said it was nuts for Musk to completely eliminate Doge and put at risk all the people that were getting pepfar and the AIDS treatment. So, like. And that she immediately then scrambled to do everything she could to rescue the best parts of usaid. So, like, we. And we also got her defense of, like, RFK Jr. She's like, he's a kook, but my kook or something. Whatever, Something like that. And that, you know, you need somebody who's, you know, gonna. Maybe. Is he pushing too hard? Yeah, maybe he is. But you have to do that to, like, get back to balance. So you got some real insight into kind of like, who she is and what her politics are. I wouldn't read too much into the defenses, though, of her, because up until the second that she is chief of staff, she's the gatekeeper and she's in charge. And if you work for her, you praise her.

[Sophie Cunningham]

You praise her. Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Like, whether you agree with it or not, and maybe you praise her in public and privately, you're working to get her out.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Although rebuttal to that just quickly is that if you think Trump is pissed at her, you don't praise her. So that's where I think there's. It was safe to read a bit into it, is that they wouldn't have gone out because it's Trump and then her. And so if they were. If it was being telegraphed to them that Trump was furious about what Susie.

[Krystal Ball]

Did, once Trump defended, then it's like, all right, let's all get in the pool.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Let's jump on in. Yep. And finally, the. I mean, another reason you see Fox asking Caroline Levitt, like, what? You clearly cooperated very closely with Vanity Fair because they did these photo shoots and then, of course, made the photos look as unflattering as is humanly possible. We can put this up on the screen. Last element here. This is the Trump team. You see James Blair, you see Dan Scavino, Steven Miller, Suzie Wiles, Caroline Levitt, J.D. vance, Marco Rubio. It's interesting to me that you have two Cabinet secretaries in this picture with staffers. Not that Stephen Miller is just a mere staffer, but he is a staffer. He's not in the Cabinet. So I thought that was actually kind of interesting in and of itself. I mean, it's clearly Trump's inner circle among people who are.

[Krystal Ball]

Do we have the White House to compare it to?

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yes, we do. This immediately reminded people of another photo shoot. Ryan, what do you think?

[Krystal Ball]

Do we have any staffers there who we got in the back?

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah, we do. So we've got. Actually, this is mostly. You're right. This is mostly.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, vice President, President.

[Sophie Cunningham]

That's Andy Card.

[Krystal Ball]

Did you call Condoleezza Rice a staffer? She was like, head of national. You know, nsa.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Depends on what point in the presidency this was. Right?

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. What? Andy Card.

[Sophie Cunningham]

And then who's the other Chief of staff? Andy Carter was chief of staff, but.

[Krystal Ball]

Who'S the other dude there?

[Sophie Cunningham]

Oh, George Tenet.

[Krystal Ball]

Oh, CIA boss.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So. But look at that. Power poses all around.

[Krystal Ball]

I did one of those for Politico magazine.

[Ryan Grim]

No way.

[Krystal Ball]

At the Intercept. I think it was a profile of us in, like, 2019 after, like, the AOC election.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Really? Is it still around?

[Krystal Ball]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Google, like, Politico Intercept 2019 or something.

[Sophie Cunningham]

It's a dangerous thing to pose for.

[Krystal Ball]

It was fine. We look, Mehdi was still with us, so he's in the picture.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Oh, I see it. Oh, my gosh. You're doing the crossed arms and everything. This is so funny.

[Krystal Ball]

We'll add it in post.

[Sophie Cunningham]

We're adding this in post. You look intimidating, right?

[IBM Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Look out.

[Sophie Cunningham]

I'm scared.

[Krystal Ball]

If you're a Corporate Democrat in 2019, you were.

[Sophie Cunningham]

This guy's got his sleeves rolled up.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, they asked me to roll the sleeves up. I was like, all right.

[Sophie Cunningham]

They asked you to roll the sleeves up. Oh, that's cool.

[Krystal Ball]

I was like, but I don't do that. They're like, we don't care. Let's do it.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I mean, it's a dangerous. I don't know if you caught this. Trump in the Oval Office was when he had the miracle. The guys from Minnesota, the miracle hock. And the other day, they had him put on a cowboy hat, and he was like, there is a man named Michael Dukakis. He's like, he put on the hat. Did not go well for him. Yeah. So he's very conscious of these image questions, which we all know. And by the way, this is the Last point I'll make about this big story is if you don't think people of the White House believe some of these decisions are crazy, then you have not been paying enough attention. You do not understand the right in Trump's. Under Trump's Republican Party, because the dissension privately about a lot of these policies is constant.

[Krystal Ball]

And she said tariffs, too. She was like, I thought his tariff ideas were wrong. And like, yes, I didn't want him to roll it out. And it hasn't worked. And.

[Sophie Cunningham]

And sometimes, by the way, sometimes you see that playing out on camera. There was disagreement in the Trump administration at the time, publicly, between Elon Musk and Jameson Greer, others about the tariff policy. And so the story, it's very interesting to see how Wiles is describing it. It's fascinating to see that she did this to a journalist. But just know this stuff is, of course, what people are thinking behind closed doors. And you can make up your judgment about whether or not that's good or bad, but it's happening.

[Krystal Ball]

Last point, for people who might be confused. Chris Whipple is. He's most famous as the author of a book on White House chiefs of staff.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yes.

[Krystal Ball]

And so if I had to guess, she maybe thought that this was coming out after her tenure was over, and maybe her tenure is about to be over.

[Sophie Cunningham]

That's so interesting.

[Krystal Ball]

And I think that their first conversation was pre inauguration. And I think as they continue to have conversations and no article came out, despite her saying kind of controversial things, she got more and more comfortable that, oh, yeah, this is. This is coming later. This is not a problem for you now. So I'm just gonna be completely honest and so that I can get my perspective, give my perspective to, like, the historian of American chiefs of staff, of president.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah, that's super cool.

[Krystal Ball]

So he's not just a normal journalist from Vanity Fair. Like, that's the thing he's known for. So she's. She's speaking to her own legacy.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah. She agrees to give a book interview. And Kushner has recommended this guy's books, by the way. So that's one of the rumors of how maybe this happened that is going around is, did Kushner make everyone feel comfortable?

[Krystal Ball]

She probably has also talked to former chiefs of staff.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

Like, what should I know about the job? And they would have spoken well of him because.

[Ryan Grim]

Right.

[Krystal Ball]

She probably will in a year.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Principals, you know this better than I do. But principals get afraid about book interviews because you never know how it's actually going to be used and what context it's going to come out in. And so that actually seems like a pretty good theory too.

[IBM Ad Voice]

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[Ryan Grim]

Cleaning out your home is everything. It clears your space, your mind. And it can give you holiday shopping power with Trashy. Trashy is the easiest way to tidy up for the holidays. Clean out and donate what you don't need and make room for stuff you'll actually enjoy. Just buy a trashy bag, fill it with anything you no longer need, any brand, any condition. We take everything, then ship it free and earn trashy cash points instantly guaranteed. Keep earning points when you shop exclusive trashy deals and redeem for shopping wherever you want or even donate them to charity. It's simple, it's satisfying, and it's sustainable since 95% of what you send gets reused or recycled. So those pants you love but never wear, instead of your closet or a landfill, they could wind up hugging someone else's butt while also unlocking a little festive shopping power for you. Buy your bag and clean out for the [e-mail] that's T R A S H I E I o este diciembre.

[Krystal Ball]

De ahoros and los obtain gratis dos eravientas dewalt Craftsman o gobalt al compra una bateria o un quit selecto yaora cuarentadola res Eneramientas Craftsman V20 Selectas Loos Nosotros Ayudamos 2 Ahoras. Visita to Louis Mastercano in Colorado street in Kennewick. Let's have some fun with Bari Weiss. So first of all, the New York Times and we'll talk about this later in the segment. New York Times did it like 30,000 word or something article New York Magazine.

[Sophie Cunningham]

I was wrong. So this was New York Magazine.

[Krystal Ball]

Well, New York Times did a Jeffrey Epstein piece and we'll talk about that in the back half of this segment. But yes, New York Magazine is out with a new profile of Bari Weiss's return from the wilderness of Los Angeles. And we'll also talk about her town hall on Saturday night with Eric Kirk and how poorly the ratings turned out. But so tell us about this New York Magazine profile of Barry Weiss. And what did we learn about the way that she went from effectively fired, but sort of quitting, pushed out of the New York Times and now at the top of the kind of world of journalism.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah. And if people don't remember, Bari Weiss was pushed out of the New York Times because she was writing journalism that made people uncomfortable over MeToo stuff. There were constant leaks about the New York Times of the New York Times, like internal slack channel of people just like gossiping about Barry. Because honestly, a lot of it started with what she was writing on MeToo. And Bill Maher in this New York magazine article talks about how he read that MeToo piece that Barry wrote. It went pretty viral at the time and said, I'm gonna make this woman famous. So he's sort of trying to take credit for Bari Weiss to New York magazine. But when it all started to crescendo was after the New York Times published that Tom Cotton op ed, then retracted the Tom Cotton op ed, the bunch.

[Krystal Ball]

Of stuff at which was about he said, send in the guard.

[Sophie Cunningham]

They put the headline on it that said send in the troops. So It's June of 2020, and it said we should use the Insurrection act to quell violent protests. It did specifically say violent protests. New York Times staffers posted in unison that the piece put black New York Times staffers in danger. It became a very, very 2020 controversy and James Bennett gets fired. Barry kind of self deports after that to ends up with Nellie Bowles, who was also at the New York Times. A reporter at the New York Times, but married. Now they have kids. They were in Los Angeles for a really long time. And what we learned from the story is that her arc at the Times, she'd been at the Journal before. Her arc at the Times actually piqued the interest of some people in Los Angeles when she was originally blogging on her subset called Common Sense, which turned into the Free Press. And this is interesting because there were salon dinners happening reportedly in la. And I had heard about some of this. I didn't know the extent of it with CEOs and Hollywood actors where Barry was being sort of commoditized as the hot dinner guest in L. A. There was a joke on Curb about it at the time actually too, that some people might remember. But it's. She was. People were convening salon type dinners to have Barry talk about the stifling of free expression and censorship and what was like going on with the left. And this is a lot of rich people. So you can kind of see then how this congealed and built to 2024, and then to the Ellison deal, which brought in the Free Press. Because what was happening in the background is, as there were struggle sessions literally happening at so many of these corporations. As you would imagine, there was some dissent. And it seemed as though, because you had Bari Weiss, this centrist social. I don't even know what you would say. Like, I would call her sort of socially liberal. But what does that even mean? I don't know. But you have this, like, kind of centrist lesbian from mainstream media that made people feel comfortable venting their frustrations with the left. And that builds into common sense, becoming big, getting major investors at the Free Press. And so the New York magazine piece tells that story and shows the extent to which it was bringing in extremely rich people, extremely powerful people all around. Barry. And it helps us, I think, contextualize what she means to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, which is she became the.

[Krystal Ball]

Go to and the yes. And her early career and her college activism was around Israel, Palestine, where she led a bunch of campaigns to try to get Palestinian professors fired. And a lot of people remembered that when she emerged as this, like, leading Cancel Culture voice, like, wait a minute. The same person who was, like, literally leading cancel culture before, it was a thing trying to get people fired for their political views is now saying that you should not try to get people fired for their political views. But she Never, in the 2020-23 range. Never. She didn't make Zionism or canceling Palestinian professors remotely part of her politics.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Not one bit.

[Krystal Ball]

It wasn't. You can go through her, like, social media and her writing at the time, it's basically absent from there. And so the thing that the rich people in Los Angeles were really glomming onto was like, oh, yeah, somebody who looks young and liberal but saying things that I agree with.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Right.

[Krystal Ball]

And then when they find out later.

[Sophie Cunningham]

It'S not Ben Shapiro.

[Krystal Ball]

Right after October 7th.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Krystal Ball]

That she's also, like, a hardcore supporter of Israel and will bend all journalistic norms to defend Israel. They're like, well, that's a wonderful bonus. And so they got the whole package there. So then Ellison winds up getting lunch with her and. Or whatever, they meet, and she's like. And then he talks about poaching her to come to CBS if he ends up buying it. And to her credit, she's like, cool, I'll do it. I'll run it.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Right?

[Krystal Ball]

I'm the boss.

[Sophie Cunningham]

And she reports to him, not to the news division. Like, she is the head reporting just.

[Krystal Ball]

To him and taking a Very unusual turn for an executive. Turning the camera around right on her because she thinks that what the American right apparently wants is more people like Barry Weiss on the camera.

[Sophie Cunningham]

David Ellison, by the way, just quickly, before we move on to the ratings, I think that's where we're about to go. I pulled his FEC record last night. He was in 2024, a big Dem donor.

[Krystal Ball]

Interesting.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah. And it just makes the point that you were. Because apparently it was in 2024 when he met with Barry and started talking about whether they could do some type of merger. And in the piece it's mentioning how she's getting introduced to Jeff Bezos and I mean, some of the richest people who have ever walked the face of the earth and they are fascinated by her. And it just makes so much more sense that you have this 100 and $150 million deal between Paramount and the Free Press, because she is not. She's seen as like this giant among journalists by these people who just think she's the best thing since sliced bread because they had some well founded fears about illiberalism creeping into the mainstream. The Tom Cotten op ed was legitimately a bad decision. Retracting that was legitimately a bad decision from the New York Times. And so she then becomes the focal point of that angst. And it makes, I think, that the story helps everyone make sense. They kind of. We had this fuzzy knowledge that this was happening, but it really fleshes out exactly how it was happening.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. And so she comes to CBS News Saturday night. She did a town hall. There was an Army Navy game leading into the town hall and the ratings into it absolutely nose dived. And then kind of climbed again after the town hall was over. Glenn Greenwald put up E2 here, making the point. CBS News has 7 million subscribers on YouTube. Beyond the anemic ratings, they also put Barry's primetime special on their YouTube channel and it has a grand total of 72,000 views after two days, which in fairness to Barry is 10 times more than most Free Press videos get. He also had said, I actually didn't think it was possible to take one of the three major TV networks and in primetime drag it down to the lowly ratings level of so catty. Yet Bari Weiss, in her first on camera special managed to accomplish this remarkable feat. And he was sharing a Dylan Byers article there, which, which we can put up. This is E3. So the numbers coming in. So 1.9 total viewers. 1.9 million total viewers is across streaming and broadcast Networks. This is CBS's framing of it up 32% boost in the CBS time slot, outpacing CBS season to date for Saturdays at 8pm but if you compare it to a year ago, it was down substantially. Now, I will give her credit, it says 185 million views on social. Now a bunch of those views are made up.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Oh, social views are bullshit.

[Krystal Ball]

Instagram and Twitter, but they're bullshit. Even. Let's say it's 10% of that. Like, we covered it like we talked about it. Yeah, it was on social media like nothing else that CBS News has ever done it like, or CBS has done at 8pm on a Saturday is actually making. Hey on social media now. Most people were making fun of it, so I don't know if that's.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Well, people were really talking about it. I mean, it definitely had people engaging in discourse about Erica Kirk. Yeah, I mean, it was definitely newsy, but the question of whether you're able to draw people back to CBS with newsiness, that's the problem she's supposed to be solving. Right. I mean, she's supposed to be doing good journalism and the like, but also that's supposed to be a magnet for more and more eyeballs. And that's where you see them boosting those social numbers. But we all know, and I'm sure their executives know, though I'm constantly surprised by how gullible some of these folks are that Twitter just counts like people scrolling past it as a view sometimes. And sure, it's the same is true on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok that you don't have to actually tune into much of it. It could be a couple of seconds to count it as a view.

[Krystal Ball]

Right.

[Sophie Cunningham]

So are you monetizing and are you like, is your influence scaling up with those numbers? That's a huge, huge question. And that's, I think, what, what Glenn is getting at. It's. You can, you can say season to date going up with a big interview like that, People would probably expect bigger numbers for such a big get. I wasn't surprised by those numbers at all. I just. Erica Kirk is still not. It's not like getting the President.

[Krystal Ball]

She's everywhere too. Didn't she host the Five?

[Sophie Cunningham]

I don't know.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, she, like, guest hosted the Five. Like, there's no shortage of Erica Kirk content, if that's your thing.

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[Ryan Grim]

Decluttering is everything. It clears your space, your mind. And now it can give you shopping power. With trashy. That's trashy with an ie, not a Y. Trashy is an easy way to get instant value for donating all that clutter you've got lying around. Just buy a trashy bag, fill it with anything you no longer need. Any brand, any condition. We take everything, then ship it free and earn points instantly guaranteed. Keep earning points when you shop exclusive trashee deals and redeem them for gift cards to brands you love or even donate them to charity. It's simple, it's satisfying, and it's sustainable since 95% of what you send gets reused or recycled. Think of trashee as that little push you need to finally get rid of that stuff you don't use. After all, it's just sitting there, taking up space when it could be turned into shopping power. It's time to make space for what's next. Buy your bag and start decluttering today at T R A S H I E I O that's T R A S H I E I O.

[Krystal Ball]

Este diciembre de ahoros en los obtain gratis dos eravientas de world Craftsman o gobalt al comprado na bateria o un quit selecto ya horra cuarentad La Resenerramientas Craftsman V20 Selectas Lowe's Nosotros Ayudamos 2 Ahoras.

[Ryan Grim]

Visita to loos Mastercano in Colorado street and Kennewick.

[Krystal Ball]

We are running late, so we'll try to do this real quickly. But if you put up E4 new investigation by the New York Times that runs like tens of thousands of words called scams schemes. Ruthless. The untold story of how Jeffrey Epstein got rich. Now, the point of this seemed to be to knock down conspiracy theories. One of their lines in here. In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation. But we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. Classic New York Times formulation. Abundant conspiracy theorists say X. But we found a thing that is completely non responsive to that thing. Like, I don't know anybody that's claiming that his blackmail operation was lucrative. Do you know, like, I've never seen somebody say the way he made his money was through a blackmail operation. If you want to talk to the conspiracy theorists.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah, that's an interesting point.

[Krystal Ball]

The blackmail is on behalf of intelligence agencies.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Right.

[Krystal Ball]

And also helps him stay out of jail for all of the different crimes that he's committing. Like that would be the theory behind the blackmail operation that I've never even seen. The theory that he was shaking people down. Now I think Leon Black actually may be like, there might be a little bit of like, okay, I'll pay you 40 million a year. Because you know what we've been doing and we're just hypothesizing here not talking and we're talking all in the realm of allegations. But that. So anyway, so nothing that they found here to me disproves that he worked for spy services.

[Sophie Cunningham]

I was so curious to get your take on this because I saw people bouncing the story around social media saying we learned so much from it.

[Krystal Ball]

Case closed.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Okay, so does it fill in some details? Yes, absolutely. It fills in some details. Yeah. It's interesting stuff about people who were investing with him early in his career. But it absolutely. You get through all of these thousands of words and it's not case closed at all about how he made so much money. The implication or the suggestion question or in some case the accusation is that his fortune was kind of from siphoning off funds from people like.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, which I think is true, by the way.

[Sophie Cunningham]

I'm sure that is. Yeah, I'm sure that's true. It still does not explain how he went from a fail. Like he was basically pushed out of Bear Stearns and this article explains that. Then how you keep failing up and up and up. It doesn't actually ultimately explain that at all. That still remains. If anything, it's more of a mystery after you see how many people were screwed over by him. Powerful people were screwed over by him in his early years and actually throughout his entire career, seemingly. It doesn't make any more sense, I don't think at least.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. And so the Epstein Transparency act kicks in Friday. We're supposed to get a big release of information probably come five o' clock on the Friday before the Christmas break. But that'll be interesting to see what's in there. We have to cut this short. But two things I would point to and we'll have a story on this hopefully by Friday because then we can talk about it on the Friday show at drop site. Yeah. So two things I would flag in here that are interesting that raise More questions that they answer. So he says they started. So he's talking about this. He said that year the couple traveled to England. While they were there, Hale took Epstein to visit a rich acquaintance of hers, Nick Leese, at his family's countryside manor. There they met Nick's father, Douglas Leese, a defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry and the British government. He took an immediate liking to Epstein. Story we've been working on focuses significantly on this Douglas Lees character. Go ahead and look up Douglas Leese. If you're in the New York Times. You think it's sufficient to just tell your readership that he's a, quote, defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry. You're going to have to wait for drops on news to tell you a little bit more about who Douglas Leese is and who these connections were in the arms industry and who he did his defense, quote, unquote, defense contracting with. You won't be surprised to learn.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Was it Venezuela?

[Krystal Ball]

It was not Venezuela. A lot of it going on in the Middle East. Separately, they say, and this is useful revelation, that, quote, back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger and Pottinger's brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. The broker told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission and then they kind of just move on. Who is Pottinger? A central figure in the Iran contrast in which the US Worked with Israel to send weapons to Iran in exchange for cash that they would eagerly send to the Contras. We'll get a lot more into that.

[Sophie Cunningham]

So Robert Maxwell.

[Krystal Ball]

So they've all kinds of things and Maxwell were tight. So we've connected you. So the New York Times connected him to Lease, which he had denied a connection to Douglas Leese, by the way. They don't even mention that in the past he had angrily rejected any connection to like, Douglas Lees and said maybe he knew the kid and there's a reason he would want to angrily reject a connection to Douglas Lees. And then he's got him connected to a key figure in Iran Contra. But to the New York Times. This is more prosaic.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yes. Just as is. Yep. Yeah, I'm glad you're doing reporting on that because when I saw the line defense contractor, I was like, this is again, not a moron. Not answering questions. You're not a moron. Creating questions like. Yes, because I clicked on the link from somebody who had posted and been like, lots of questions answered here. And as I'm reading it, I'm like, no, lots of questions raised. What are you talking about? All right, looking forward to that draft site report and hopefully we'll be able to talk about it on the Friday show. Let's move on to updates in the Brown University shooting that left two students dead. Kash Patel announced yesterday they're offering a reward. We can put this video up on the screen. You'll watch it. You can, you can see they put out a video, a person of interest in that shooting at Brown University from the weekend. They have now announced a $50,000 reward. You can see the person, if you're listening to this, you can see the person walking around different parts of the Brown campus in the seemingly of the Brown campus in the daylight. Person is dressed in all black. Can't really make out details of who it is. But that's where the FBI announced yesterday, actually they have this person of interest. It came though, as we learned next element up on the screen that mit, which is of course in Boston, not all that far. Well, Cambridge, if we're going to do that thing, not all that far from Providence. A professor at MIT who was a nuclear scientist essentially was shot to death at home in Brookline. So huge, huge update potentially in the Brown story. We have no evidence that this is connected or not. But Brian Bryan, as you saw, I was combining Brown and Ryan, the Brown. This is the next video. We put this up on the screenover at Brown. You see the FBI agent. I don't want to laugh at this, Ryan, because it just, but they're just scraping the snow here looking for evidence and they're like tripping around as they're kicking the snow looking for evidence. So I'm sure that we're going to get to the bottom of this soon enough. But as you put earlier, you either have two people on the loose or one person who has now killed three people on the loose in New England.

[Krystal Ball]

And so the FBI scrambling is now offering a $50,000 reward. Or presumably you can get a private flight to Vegas with Kash Patel, valued at $50,000. He recently appeared on Katie Miller's podcast.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah, that dropped last night. Yeah. Apparently it was recorded before the Brown shooting.

[Krystal Ball]

In any event, it's about him and his little, his girlfriend.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Right. Tell them maybe to hold the episode.

[Krystal Ball]

Until afterwards or maybe don't do that at all. Like, what are you doing?

[Sophie Cunningham]

Well, there's that, too. Yes.

[Krystal Ball]

When he was appointed, I said, good, because I think it's good to have an incompetent boob running an agency that does a lot of bad things. I now am regretting that. Like, apparently you do need some level of competence at the head of this agency. Like, come on.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Well, in the case of Brown, if this MIT shooting turns out murder, turns out to be connected to the Brown murder mass shooting, you have a situation where in Brown, the authorities were saying, first of all, Patel said they had, he said they had detained, they had somebody who was a suspect in detention. And it was kind of. It was like a long X post. And the tone of it was sort of, we got the guy. And maybe I'm being uncharitable and reading too much into that, but that was the tone that I took from Patel's post on X. And the authorities in Providence were basically like, everything is fine. Everyone should feel safe. So if it turns out that the same person shot, then murdered another professor, this time at mit, so someone else from a campus, they're going to look even dumber for trying to assuage the fears of the community, which we're like learning as the person is still on the loose, actually should be that people should be afraid in Providence because they don't have the person.

[Krystal Ball]

And obviously all human life is precious. Nuno Loreiro appears to be like one of the most brilliant guys you can imagine. Like, just a brain that just has like an inconceivable level of intelligence in it. And so, like, tributes are pouring in from people talking about the, you know, what he will now be unable. What he will now be unable to contribute to society. And it's something we can't even conceive of because he's one of those kinds of people who's able to think beyond other mere mortals.

[Sophie Cunningham]

And obviously there's speculation happening right now that this is foreign policy related. When you have a leading nuclear scientist.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah, according to Israel, he is a completely legitimate target. Like all nuclear scientists to them are legitimate targets. Which is. Which I hope that underscores just how barbaric it is to be bombing nuclear scientists and their families at will.

[Sophie Cunningham]

We'll obviously keep everybody updated on the story because if it's connected to the Brown case, if it's connected to any foreign policy, it's huge. And so we're going to follow it really, really closely.

[IBM Ad Voice]

So you're telling me that the AI that's meant to make everyone's job easier to manage just adds more to manage. On top of the thousands of apps the IT department already manages funny how that works. Any business can add AI. IBM helps you scale and manage AI to change how you do business. Let's create smarter Business IBM.

[Ryan Grim]

Cleaning out your home is everything. It clears your space, your mind, and it can give you holiday shopping power with Trashy Trashy is the easiest way to tidy up for the holidays. Clean out and donate what you don't need and make room for stuff you'll actually enjoy. Just buy a trashy bag, fill it with anything you no longer need, any brand, any condition we take, take everything, then ship it free and earn trashy cash points instantly guaranteed. Keep earning points when you shop exclusive trashy deals and redeem for shopping wherever you want or even donate them to charity. It's simple, it's satisfying, and it's sustainable since 95% of what you send gets reused or recycled. So those pants you love but never wear, instead of your closet or a landfill, they could wind up hugging someone else's butt while also unlocking a little festive shopping power for you. Buy your bag and clean out for the [e-mail] that's T R A S H I E I O este diciembre.

[Krystal Ball]

De ahoros en los obten gratis dos rabientas de Walt Craftsman o gobalt al compra una bateria o un quit selecto ya hora Cuarentadola's Craftsman V20 many selectas los nosotros. Visita to los Master Cano in Colorado street in Kennewick.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Ryan should we move on to Gaza?

[Krystal Ball]

So, first of all, in a kind of out of nowhere, Trump issued a new travel ban, expanding the list of countries to include the Palestinian Authority. So putting people from the Palestinian Authority on the travel ban has an added layer of cruelty because they don't have their own country. Like, it's one thing if you ban people from Chad from traveling. They can be in Chad, but in the Palestinian Authority, if, like, they may be at extreme risk from the occupying country, they don't have their own sovereignty to fall back on. And so we'll be exploring that and the consequences of it more thoroughly in the days to come. But today I wanted to talk about living conditions in Gaza in a way that goes beyond the kind of normal headlines that we get. We had a story yesterday in Drop site that you could put up G2 here. The headline tells it all Garbage is poisoning Gaza. And this is by Abdelkader Saba, who's a videographer and photographer in Gaza, who works with our editor Sharif Abdel Kaddus who co authored this piece and the footage and the photos that we'll be showing you here of the trash pile up is from Abdel Khadr Saba. So you can roll the next element. I'll just read some of this piece here. Over the past two years, Gaza's civilian infrastructure has been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military, including waste management services. And so what you're looking at here are, is a transfer station. And in a typical. This is the Yarmouk waste transfer site. So typically at a transfer site people bring in garbage and then it gets transferred to its final resting place or its incineration place or a landfill or what have you. The final waste treatment facility where this transfer site would transfer the waste to is now behind the yellow line that Israel has drawn. And so they're not taking anymore. So every day more and more trucks coming in and it just piles up. You see children playing on it there. You see people setting up their tents absolutely right next to it. The quotes that Abdel Khadar Saba got from people who are living there are just horrifying. One person told him, this is my tent and this is the garbage dump I'm living across from. We don't sleep, not at night, nor during the day because of the garbage. The smell comes at us constantly. And our children are all ill. They suffer from severe headaches. We're dealing with an infestation of germs and insects. Another I can see why. Yeah, you can absolutely understand it. Another person said, we were displaced from the city of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip and we came to Gaza City. We found that the displaced were crowded in every corner of the Strip. We were forced to live among garbage in the Yarmouk garbage site of the Gaza municipality. We had thought we'd stay somewhere safe, somewhere decent, but we were forced here. There's nowhere else to go. We were forced to stay at this dump. I'm suffering because of this dump, suffering from the germs, the rats and dogs. Every day I find 20 or 30 rats inside my tent, right inside of it. I don't even have a tent fit for human life, unquote. So that is in the best of scenarios, like that's when the weather is nice, the sun is in the sky. The last couple of weeks have seen the opposite. Maybe we can roll to G5 here. You can. This young kid giving a tour of the tent village that is now constructed. You don't have to be able to understand Arabic to understand the absolute fury at what the World is delivering here as the wind blows. People have been living now three years, so you can see garbage blowing into their tent. You can see there their tents blowing away. It's a third winter that people are going into with these tents, while sufficient supplies for over a million people are sitting outside of Gaza, just outside, in trucks, just outside. This is Al Shifa Hospital. So even the hospitals were flooding from this storm. And if. And so just to underline that, supplies for more than a million people facing these conditions are in trucks outside of Gaza. We have a ceasefire. We have a ceasefire agreed to. They're supposed to allow that in. They're just simply not allowing it in. We talked to the head of a relief organization who's in Gaza, and he said his theory is that they're trying to make it just utterly unlivable. And they've, you know, they've offered to open the Rafah border in one direction out to say, like, look, it feels like it's like, okay, look, if you were holding on hope for the war to end and then you were going to stay, what we're trying to do is destroy that hope because now the war has technically ended, yet your life is just unlivable, so why don't you just leave? Right like that? That is the message that he believes that Israel, Netanyahu is sending with this.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Well, and that's one of my questions for you. Is going to be, is the U.S. involvement in. What's the best word for this being the Sherpa over this peace process? What is. What is US involvement right now looking like? And is this then also a US strategy to squeeze Gazans for the razing of the Strip into Mara Gaza or whatever?

[Krystal Ball]

Right. I mean, you would think it has to be the policy is what it's doing. The US military, you know, they set up this coordination center with Israel to try to deconflict during the ceasefire, which Israel breaks effectively every single day and announces that it has broken it. But we, so we, the US military sent some of our top logistics experts that we have, and the US military does have, like, when it comes to logistics, like, they have been taking it extremely seriously for 200 years and have some of the best at it. So we sent our best and brightest to this coordination center to figure out how is it that we're not able to get the supplies in and get the supplies distributed to the population. Within weeks, they all left because they were like, oh, this is not a logistics problem, this is a political problem. And the military said this publicly. The problem is the Israelis have a list of things that they call dual use, dual military use that they won't let in. And the list includes tent poles, pencils, paper. Cooking fuel is almost non existent at this point. And so they're like, you don't need us. We're not the answer to this problem. The logistics are solvable. The political problem is what you need.

[Sophie Cunningham]

To deal with those images. If people were just listening to this, go ahead and find the YouTube video of the segment because you can see the proximity of the tents to the garbage and it's horrifying.

[Krystal Ball]

Yeah. And just getting worse every single day as it piles up and piles up. Meanwhile, there was a, I don't know if you saw this. There was an AI image going around of a fake account who's trying to just raise money on Chuft saying like, look at my family. And it's like 12 Palestinians in a tent but the water's up to their waist which is of course is impossible because the tents are not watertight. So you're not getting like. And there wouldn't be that packed in. But it was, it was other than that, other than the water. You look at it, it's like, wow, that looks real. So you're going to see a lot of. And it. To, to X's credit, it did have a note on it that said this is AI generated because they could figure out with the hands and stuff like that and also the water level. But like. So people like AI is going in and just expl. And exploiting this misery.

[Sophie Cunningham]

Yeah. And obviously I know your reporting follows this closely, but everyone is happy that the war is over. You know, humane people are happy that the war is over. But on the other side of that, the political incentives to keep an eye on the humanitarian crisis are obviously diminished at this point right here in the US and all over the world.

[Krystal Ball]

Yes, indeed, awful. So yes, we will be back on Friday and then we'll roll out for a couple weeks, two weeks I guess we're have like pre tape segments. Yesterday I interviewed Nathaniel Raymond who's a Yale humanitarian researcher on Sudan. I think we'll post his video. That was incredible and sobering. Intense interview with this guy talking about like, like as, as bad as things are in Gaza, like the, in Sudan, like the number of people getting killed and starved. It's like, like we're. If, if it continues like this, we're going to be at Rwanda levels and, and then we'll. For 20 years we'll have people talking about why nobody did anything.

[Sophie Cunningham]

I look forward to watching that. Yeah, we have, we have some great pre recorded content coming out right now. I interviewed Emily, I interviewed Ryan, so that'll be fun. And we will have a Friday show this week. So this isn't us signing off until 2026. You will still get another dose of us on Friday and then some prerecorded doses of us over the holiday. But I'm looking forward to being back here in the New Year. Ryan, the first Wednesday of the new year is going to be January 7th.

[Krystal Ball]

All right?

[Sophie Cunningham]

So it's going to be a while before we're back in the studio.

[Krystal Ball]

All right, stay safe. We'll see you then.

[Sophie Cunningham]

See ya. This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without you knowing. If anyone has ever said you snored loudly, or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability and concentration issues, it may be due to osa. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleep on OSA.com this information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

[Ryan Grim]

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